Monday, December 13, 2010

So here it is, Monday, December 13th. A lot of hard work went into last week and this week. I'm very excited about the Christmas season that is upon us. Such a wonderful, beautiful time of the year and I think that having little ones just emphasizes the beauty of it. We are going to be doing so many fun activities in the next few weeks it will be nearly impossible to list them all. I will try to cover the ones that I think we will use the most/have the most fun with. So without further delay here they are!

This is a game I created with the help of clipart. These snowflakes all have 1-6 arms. Annabelle will be counting and sorting them into similar piles. Some of our Hh activities can be found here: http://confessionsofahomeschooler.blogspot.com/2010/11/letter-h-for-hippo.html This sites theme for this letter is obviously hippos. There is a hippo color/color word match, hippo builders (We did this with the fish and it was quite a challenge for Annabelle and she liked it so I thought we'd give it another shot with the hippos.), and of course the capital H, lowercase h sort.

This is kind of a dorky game that I made, but I think that the kids will appreciate it. There are four clothespins of each color for each horse. The goal is to match the clothespins to the correct color horse. Ok....stop laughing. :) It's supposed to be a memorable game to help enforce the letter Hh. lol

I have not had time to put together Silas' new trays yet. Fortunately he is still quite interested in the ones from last week. Hope you enjoyed this and became inspired to do some fun Christmas activities of your own! Happy blogging.

This is only going to be one day of the week in review. It seems that I misplaced my camera after this day. And by misplaced I mean I set it somewhere one of the kids could get it and it disappeared until yesterday. It is back now so I can post what we did on one day this week. lol I'm glad to say that we are on our way to being back on track. We completed three and a half days of schooling and are well underway already today with finishing some of last weeks activities.

The Little People Nativity set has been played with a whole lot this week. All three kids are really enjoying it. Annabelle likes to set it up every night before she goes to bed. She does a really great job with this. I snapped this picture after she finished putting it all together. Annabelle has done much better this week with knowing/identifying the letter Gg (and Ff). We will be moving on to the letter Hh on either Tuesday or Wednesday. We were able to introduce that letter to her this last week as well. Here she is playing with her gumball counting game. She enjoyed this a lot. We finished up a project that we started a couple of weeks ago. The kids painted bottle caps purple and then we glued them on paper to make a bunch of grapes.

Here is Asa gluing.

I really think that they turned out pretty cute! Annabelle's is on the right and if you look at the bottom right corner of her paper she wrote her own letter Gg! She did a fantastic job.

Here is Asa mailing the Christmas cards. He really had a hard time sticking them in the envelopes so we only did that part once. Annabelle and Asa really both like this mailbox and played with it almost every day!

Asa loves this Melissa and Doug Beginner Shape Patterns set. It's really helping him along with learning his shapes too. I find it humorous that he is able to identify a rectangle, but has a hard time remembering what a square is. lol

Silas had a grand time during his Tot School this week. The bells were a big hit. I had to pay really close attention though, seems like he really enjoyed the way that they felt in his mouth. I normally don't have much of a problem with him putting things in his mouth, but this week he was all about it.

He also played with this activity a lot. I love his little hands in this picture. So much concentration is involved in sticking those pom poms into the Christmas tree spots!

Pretty proud of himself.

He also really enjoyed playing with the Nativity set. I think we were singing Away in a Manger when this picture was taken. We've sang that song close to a gazillion times this last week. The kids are practicing it for church this Sunday night. Now Silas doesn't really sing the actual words, but I know that in his little heart he is praising Jesus with the best of them! Make a joyful noise....and well he does that very well.

Here they all are having a picnic lunch and watching Finding Nemo (Ff review). The fourth little guy is my nephew Jude that I watch a few days a week.

Good review week. Looking forward to diving into this week. Last full week before daddy comes home! Looking forward to his return. Happy blogging.

Monday, December 6, 2010

I'm back and feeling totally refreshed!! As said previously I'm missing my Nov./Dec. crayon so no crayon date for you....but it is the week of December 6. :) I want to start off by sharing my incredible new contraption. This is my Scotch laminator hard at work. I am super excited about this little guy. It takes a laminating job that I would've done in 2.5 hours give or take and crunches it into 20 minutes tops! I am very pleased to say the least. So here is my new little buddy......

All of December we will be focusing on the birth of Jesus and celebrating God's greatest gift to us, salvation. I have plenty of fun activities that I will be sharing in the upcoming weeks, and a few are included in this post. I also got out our Little People Nativity set. I think that it is so important to have a set that kids can play with, ours is very loved. It is so sweet to watch them take set up the manger scene and tell the story in their own words. One of my favorite parts of Christmas thus far.

Annabelle is reviewing the letters A-G this week. We are doing a deeper focus on the letters Ff and Gg because these letters were new to us before our break and she is having difficulty remembering their phonic sounds. We will be reviewing the fish activities that I previously posted. She also will be working on the gumball games that were previously posted. Here are pictures of the finished gumball games. I got the idea to use pom poms instead of paper gumballs from another blogging mom. I think it turned out much more interesting than the original activity.

The Big G, little g sort. As always, these are way too easy for Annabelle but it really is just for recognition purposes.

This is a fun game that I printed off from......I don't remember where. Really simple, easy game. Roll the dice and identify which number was rolled. 6 is the number of the month so this will be a fun game to learn more about the number 6 with.

New window clings from the Target Dollar Spot. Annabelle and Asa really enjoy decorating our window with things like these. I always find fun seasonal ones at Target or the Dollar Tree.

Here are a couple of Asa's trays for the week. I'm sure Annabelle will join in with this first one. Found these fun stamp sets at the Dollar Tree. The kids have done stamping before and LOVED it. I hope that they have as much fun with the Christmas stamps.

These Christmas cards have matching envelopes. The goal is to put the card into the corresponding envelope and then put them into our cute wooden Melissa and Doug mailbox (not pictured, just got it off of Craigslist!). I'm interested to see if he can get the cards into the envelopes without ruining them.

Lastly, here are Silas' trays. I think that all three of them will absolutely adore these bells, and I may just regret setting them out by the end of the week. lol There are two really big bells in the red present box. This tray cost me all of $3.00....everything is from the Dollar Tree!

One-to-one correspondence. One pom pom to each tree

Don't tell anyone, but these balls are actually dog toys.....sssshhhhh. Actually our dog has never touched them. Silas really loves balls. These were cheap in the Target Dollar Spot and they are so colorful I couldn't resist them. I think he will have a good time with them. Better get ready to play catch this week, it's one of his favorite games.

Well, that about wraps up that. lol I am going to try to get right back in here with the regular blogging schedule. So hopefully I will have a post for you on Wednesday. Happy blogging!

Wednesday, November 24, 2010

Well, let me just start out by apologizing that I have not submitted a post recently. I am very sorry. This past couple weeks I've been clouded by a funk of sorts and blogging (even preschool itself) is something that has sadly suffered from said funk. But, alas I think that it came to a head a couple days ago and I am finally snapping out of it. There will be no entries this week because of Thanksgiving. Rest assured I will be back in full force the first week of December with lots of fun happenings to share with you. For whatever is left of November I will be preparing and attempting to get my house back in order. Hey, that's hard to even attempt with three kids running underfoot!

One more thing before I go..... Have a wonderful Thanksgiving!!! Happy blogging.

Tuesday, November 16, 2010

Still missing my November/December crayon. :( We are behind in our lessons. Trying not to let that bother me too much. December is a 5 week month so that should give us plenty of time to catch up. We were supposed to be introducing the letter Hh this week, but I'm going to wait until next week so we can work on Gg some more, and doing some alphabet review. With all these new skills that Annabelle is learning I'm a little worried that she will forget all the other things that she learned. So this review will give me a good assessment of where Annabelle is at. This week I also want to start working more on her learning to write her name. I noticed that this must be one of the first things that they teach in a public preschool which makes sense (because when you have 20 kids you really need to know whose paper belongs to who). Annabelle will write most of the letters in her name, just not in the correct order. So I'm hoping by the end of the year she will have it down.

We will be continuing with our Moses lessons this week. Hoping we will get through the plagues, the parting of the Red Sea, and the Ten Commandments. I will post more on what we are doing with that in the Week in Review.

Let me apologize in advance for a couple messy pictures. I was just trying to take them and post them so I could finish prepping them. So without further delay here are our Turkey activities.

This is a turkey bowl game that I made. Pretty self explanatory. And I know that these brown lumps do not look very attractive at this moment, but they will look much cuter in our week in review. Follow this link to see what we're going to do with our chocolate play-doh (that smells really yummy!)http://countingcoconuts.blogspot.com/2010/11/turkey-playdough.html

I will say that even though it smells good I did not like the recipe that I used for this. It turned out really dry and I have no idea what to do about it. I did add more water which seemed to help. I also ran out of regular table salt so I had to use our kosher coarse salt....which really tore up my hands in the kneading process and did not dissolve good (hence the white flecks in the dough). Lesson learned: If you run out of regular table salt go to the store and get more. lol

I don't know how well you can see the individual activities, but I will explain them clockwise starting in the top left: Gg gumball sort, Math activity (place as corresponding amount of gumballs in the machine), Roll a Gumball Machine (the kids love any game that they get to use the big dice for), and Annabelle's first color by number (I really hope that she likes it)!This is a random counting file folder game that I found. This week we are reviewing numbers 1-6 so this fit in, plus who doesn't love an ice cream learning game? lol We are moving slower than I would like on numbers, but she is having a more difficult time with them. She can count to 14 (sometimes 15) before she is totally lost so I need to come up with a new strategy. A more consistent calendar time will most likely help with this.

Here is one of Asa's trays for the week. I found this at the Dollar Tree along with a lowercase one! They have some great learning toys right now for Christmas I'm assuming.These are Silas' new trays for the week, I left out his blocks and his bead rollercoaster.This is the pouring activity that you saw in the previous Week in Review post.

Just got this fun peg discovery toy off of Craigslist.

Some more new books from Target's Dollar Spot.

And a shape sorter (also from the Dollar Tree!).

Well, that is our upcoming week in a nutshell. Hope you have as much fun as we will (speaking positive words cause its been a rough morning). Happy blogging.

Monday, November 15, 2010

Good grief that was a lot of pictures to upload....not to mention that this is attempt number 3. Yes, that's right number 3, thanks to my beautiful number 3 child. It's only fitting I suppose. Well, with him in bed I should be able to accomplish this!

We did not even scratch the surface with our Moses lessons. We talked about him as a baby and about the burning bush. So Moses will be following us into this next week. What we have covered has been fun though!

This is Annabelle proudly displaying her burning bush. I have the kids usually work on something while I'm reading the lesson. For some reason it helps them focus more. Annabelle even asks more questions when she is given something to do while listening. For this activity they glued scraps of paper (that Asa cut for me) onto the bush. Here's Asa....with his Mowgli (Jungle Book) half smile. lol The garbage game was a huge hit! It came off the shelf everyday and was enjoyed by all 4 kids (my nephew included). Sad. I was looking back through my pictures and realized that I didn't have any good ones of Asa, but rest assured he was playing right along with them. Here are some of my favorite action shots:.

Annabelle coming in from the side

My nephew Jude had a great time!

Silas throwing it in the garbage with force.

Gold and green glitter Gg (with green paper and glue to boot!). Annabelle is decorating her Glitter G. I put the glitter in salt and pepper shakers to make them easier for the kids to use, but this one had a lack of holes....or the holes were too small....or both. Either way they both had to shake it a long time to get enough glitter on their papers.

Asa spreading around the gold glitter glue.

Having a lot of fun with the Gg file folder game.

Annabelle had a challenging time with this tonging activity at first. Once she got the hang of how to hold the tweezers she didn't have much of a problem. I must have put too many pom poms in the basket though, because she finished up by sorting them with her fingers. All in all she liked this and it will be in her workboxes again.

Play-doh time! When the kids play with play-doh I first give them an activity to complete before they have free play with it. Here is Asa making a triangle (Annabelle had a letter Gg play-doh mat). I tried to get them to both play with green play-doh (because it starts with g), but Annabelle insisted she use pink, plus she told me the letter it started with...how do you say no to that? lol

The next few pictures that you will see are for Silas' Tot School, which is something new we started this week. I must say he is absolutely loving his 30-45 min of mommy's undivided attention. To learn more about Tot School visit this awesome blog: http://1plus1plus1equals1.blogspot.com/

All the kids loved these buttons, which found many uses throughout the week. Lets see how many I can remember; money, pony food, stacking blocks, tea party cakes, necklace making, and mess making. lol I picked these things up probably 200 times....I'm pretty sure. Silas just really liked to look at them and put them in and out of the basket. He also started to notice the shapes. He can identify a star and a triangle (and he likes to attempt to say them too which is humorous for mommy). Asa is in this picture. The older kids are allowed to play with us, but they may not take these toys and not let Silas play (great lessons in sharing, patience, and cooperation), and they must understand that this time is for mommy and Silas.

This is a fun picture. I said, "Silas, where is a triangle?" Then he found one, picked it up, and tried to say triangle.

Goofball cheesing for the camera. We built a lot of towers (and I truly mean a lot.).

This pouring activity wasn't included in the sneak peek photos, partially because this was toward the end of the week when he was getting more and more disinterested with the activities that were on the trays. I switched one out a couple days early and am glad he did. We played with this for almost 25min! So simple. Marker caps (from dried out old markers), pringles can, and a basket....what could be more fun than that?

Concentrating really hard to get all the caps in the basket. Yes, yes, that is marker that you see on the side of his head. My children like to wreak havoc in the house while I'm trying to Skype with my husband, poor Silas was the victim this particular time. Other victims include but are not limited to, Asa's bed (totally thought I put all the crayons up....missed one...ugh), clothing drawers (all of them are now empty....hanging my head and sighing), and the bookshelf in Silas' room that houses 300 or so books is empty (his floor however is a literacy wasteland).

We finished off our week with a great afternoon outside. My awesome dad and brother, Joshua, came over to rake the yard. It was a chore! My kids all wanted to 'help'.

Annabelle raked,

Asa bagged,And Silas entertained the masses.

Hey! It is tough work being so stinking cute.

That was our week! So glad we got those leaves taken care of. Looks like after the beautiful November weather we had this last week or so that winter is going to be settling in. Happy blogging!

About Me

I am blessed to be a stay at home mom to four beautiful children ages 6, 5, almost 4, and 6 month old. I love my 'job' and even though it can get kind of crazy at times with an infant, 2 Pre-Kers, and a 1st grader I wouldn't change it.
I love to homeschool my kids, and right now my entire focus is concentrated into that.
I love God, and I love life and have a sense of humor that helps me get through it all. I hope that what I write reflects that. Enjoy!